


Wait, the end of WHOSE world?

by lyonie17



Category: Disney Princesses
Genre: Community: apocalyptothon, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-14
Updated: 2011-08-14
Packaged: 2017-10-22 14:31:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,300
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/239071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lyonie17/pseuds/lyonie17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ah, Salaam and good evening to you, worthy friend. Please, please, come closer - too close, a little too close! There. Welcome to the end of the world!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wait, the end of WHOSE world?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Flora (florahart)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/florahart/gifts).



Ah, Salaam and good evening to you, worthy friend. Please, please, come closer - too close, a little too close! There. Welcome to the end of the world!

Which end? Which world? Well, how should I know? Where are you from? I should think it would be obvious that it’s the end of your world, wherever that is.

You don’t know. You have amnesia.

Right, well, sit down over here, and tell me what sounds familiar.

Piece of paper? I don’t know paper. Oh, you want to write? Parchment? Fine, here. The famous Dead Sea Papyrus. Will not – oh, never mind.

Now then, where was I?

_______________________________

 

Are you a red-headed Greek being blackmailed by the god of the dead? Does your lover-presumptive ride a winged horse, and claim to be the son of the Olympian Zeus?

If so, this is the end of your world:

Hades might have given up, if he’d ever had a vacation. It’s not like Zeus was all that busy up on his little mountaintop, he could have stopped by for a few days every hundred years or so, taken his turn with the damned, and let Hades out into the fresh air.

But no, it’s all “Stay home, brother, and keep the fires burning,” and “How dare you try to kill my son and usurp my throne!” and “ Look at that, look at that! He’s staying mortal to be with that red-head you sicced on him, and it’s all your fault!”

And Hera, well, she’s another end, not appearing in this story. Hades tries not to think about that.

After Herk the Jerk has had sufficient time to die a mortal death, Hades starts plotting again. This time, he keeps it a little quieter, a little subtler, a little - yeah, nobody’s buying that, are they.

He lets them out. All of them. He lest the dead out, pays Charon to take them the return trip, and just lets. them. go.

So now the Pelopponesus is slowly being overrun by shambling, ravening undead hordes. The only good thing to be said is that after they tear you limb from limb, you don’t find yourself crossing the Styx. You’re just shambling and ravening yourself, so no heart-to-heart with Hades anytime soon.

No? That’s not you?  
________________________________________

Are you the daughter of an Arabian sultan, raised to ultimate privilege, and lusted after by every male in a thousand leagues? Do you sneak off into the market every chance you get, trying to learn what real life is? Have you met a mysterious prince with a monkey and a flying carpet?

If this sounds familiar, this is the end of your world:

Jafar would have been the easy way out.

After you lose Genie, everything collapses. Oh, well, you don't lose him exactly, you set him free. Well, Aladdin sets him free. Whatever.

He leaves, anyway, and then he gets careless. Phenomenal cosmic powers are only as good as the one controlling them, and he – starts forgetting things.

Important things, like which part of the country is above the sea level, and what isn't. Things like your palace not actually obeying the laws of physics. Things like all those neighboring nations who had drooled over you and your dowry for so long.

Things like that.

Aladdin is a good sultan, while he lasts. Constant sieges, drought, and the slow desertion of your armies cripple him. The assassin is almost a relief to him.

After Aladdin is gone, you creep away, out into the marketplace, and on out of the city. There is nothing for you or your child there any longer.

Of course, there wasn't anything beyond the city gate you left through, either. That's part of the country that Genie has forgotten.

_________________________________________

Are you a fairytale princess? Is your hair black as ebony, and your skin white as snow? Is your mother dead? Do you like apples, and people of less than average stature?

If this is you, your world ends this way:

The dwarves make fine friends, and better uncles. Once your husband realizes the kind of gifts your children are receiving, he makes them members of the court, most honored guests. Most of them are less than impressed, but the chance to see the children outweighs the nuisance of everyone bowing and scraping.

The “Uncles” are revered, sought after, idolized. Everyone wants to be a miner now. It's a fantastic line of work, honorable and wealthy.

Never having had more than 15 miners in the mountains at one time (one generation teaches the next, after all) the sudden influx of sovereign-sponsored apprentices causes a severely reduced level of supervision.

You don't notice much difference for a while, just all of your ladies wearing more and more jewelry, until they have to be hoisted out of their chairs, and you ban curtseying after one pregnant woman goes into premature labor in front of you, on her knees.

You try to talk to the ladies, but their only concerns are who has more metal. Instead of waist measurements, they compete now in pounds – pounds of gold.

Eventually, it may have blown over, except the brothers hit a new vein. This is purer than any they've seen, and they go to work on it as they always did, and their new friends bring it all right out into the light.

Women start to faint when they move. They can't eat, because their internal organs were being compressed. Corsets come back in, to help them stay upright, but they still can't eat, with no room for their stomachs to expand.

Every noble in the country is spending all his income on his wife's further enrichment. Peasants are being taxed and tithed, and there are riots. Gold riots. Bad landlords are kidnapped and forced to drink gold powder mixed with, well, with whatever is handy. Not always water, if you see what I mean.

There are times when you think you may have been better off if you'd just let the huntsman follow through. All the women you know are dead or dying, and all the women you don't know hate the idea of you, and would probably kill you and feed you to their children.

That's when buildings start being sucked into the earth.

It's a bit of a relief, really.  
________________________________________

Are you blonde? Do you have three godmothers? Do they bake with ‘cupses’? Have you ever seen a spindle?

If you don’t know what a spindle is, this is your life - what’s left of it:

One day, soon after you wake up from your nap (never mind that now, completely irrelevant), Charming goes hunting. He comes back with a beast over his saddle-bow that no-one, including your godmothers, has ever seen before.

After you have the cooks serve the beast for dinner, everyone at the head table, and anyone who had scraps from the head table, starts coughing blood, and vomiting blood, and - well.  You get the idea.

You don’t personally become ill, since you have been avoiding meat during your pregnancy, but everyone who partook of the beast is dead within ten days. All the deaths overwhelm the system, and some of the bodies aren’t buried right away.

It starts spreading. The capitol is decimated. Outside the walls, peasants with no assistance die nine out of ten. Neighboring countries refuse passage to people fleeing the plague, and refuse to send aid.

Unsafe food and contaminated water kill you, your twin infants, and your godmothers approximately four months after your husband went hunting. You were the last alive for 500 miles, and it’s still spreading.

Still not right?  
________________________________________

Ah, yes, the other red-head. Are you the youngest of the sea-king’s daughters?  Do you ever attend rehearsal? Is your best friend a flounder, and do you wish that you were human?

Have I got a surprise for you:

Your darling Eric is an industrial genius. He’s always been good at designing, but after he takes the throne, he starts ordering some of his designs put into practice.

Trade improves, money pours in, and the fish stop schooling. It takes three years before anyone notices, and then they don’t believe it. Fifteen years go by before anyone has the nerve to mention it to the King. Three days later, he orders all the ships to port, and shuts down the factories, but it’s too late.

You have been busy with your new family, and haven’t thought to visit Flounder in a while. When you hear about the poison in the water and run down to the coast (maids chasing you) to see, all that meets your eyes is a slick, roiling rainbow, horizon to horizon.

They won’t let you touch the water, so you sneak out later that week, after the children are asleep and Eric is shut up in his study trying to drink his way out of his genius.

At the end of the pier, you strip. You jump in, and you rejoin your world, and drown.

Too wet, you say? Let’s try this one on for size!  
_________________________________________

Well, this is a little more difficult. How to word it? Ah, yes. Are you John Smith’s Nature muse? Is your father the chief that let the English in, because you asked him to?

You’d think this would end like blondie’s story, but Aurora had it easy:

It turns out that English hate the trees. They hate brambles, and weeds, and anything that doesn’t grow in their neat, orderly, unnatural rows. So they chop down ‘their’ forest, and they back-burn the brush, and they plow the fields and they plant their maize, and tobacco, and potatoes, and cabbage.

And the next summer they do it again. Some more.

The soil stops producing. Windstorms blow away what hasn’t washed away with the rain, and the animals follow their food – away.

Five years after the English settle, they’re barely subsisting, so they ask for help. Your father is a kind man, so he gives it (again.) Two years later, they’ve used up all the seed your people can spare, their crops died anyway, and now they’re taking what you can’t spare.

When your father argues with them, they shoot him. Then they announce that anyone else caught withholding food will meet the same fate.

Withholding becomes hoarding becomes stealing becomes -

There’s not really a name for what’s next, but the land you grew up in is unrecognizable. You sit by a hole that you’ve dug, waiting for condensation to drip from the dress you’ve staked over the hole, into your shell bowl, and hoping no English will walk by. Water gathering isn’t illegal, yet, but nakedness is.

I wouldn’t recognize this world either, if I were you.  
_________________________________________

Is a book your best friend? Is the best-looking man in your village a champion expectorator? Have you ever had dinner served by singing, dancing china and silver? Do you know how many petals there are on a rose?

Should have counted these:

In all the books you've ever read, one thing has remained constant. Things get better in the end. What no one ever bothered to tell you is that life is not a book.

Sure, Beast loves you, and he is grateful to you, and he has learned his lesson. But his country has learned its lesson as well, and that's not to trust castles, or anything that lives in them.

With the magic gone, so is everything that it held. Food, water, protection, all gone. The curse was only a curse for the Beast, and assumed that he would resume his rule if he were saved.

There isn't anyone around to be ruled. Everyone is hunting the monster still.

It becomes a fad quickly. Nobles and sportsman from neighboring provinces, and from farther and farther away, travel to your old village, and hire guides, and come into the mountains looking for their fortune. The village has put out a bounty for the monster's head.

It's just a nuisance, until a group of hunters get clever. They hire a consultant. They move everyone off of the mountain. They clear-cut a firebreak completely surrounding it, and then they burn.

You've been quietly living up above it all, reading, fighting morning sickness, the usual.

Beast didn't want to worry you, and he isn't really sure what's happening anyway.

The fires change a lot. They change the weather. They change the soil. All the ash falls, not just on the mountain, but on the surrounding farmland as well. A little ash may be good once in a while, but this is too much.

Now the monster has cursed the villagers, they say. It's a declaration of war.

The consultant grins, and spits. Now, we charge, he says. There's nowhere to hide, no way to escape. And we'd better be prepared for anyone that's been in there with the thing. They've surely been suborned to its purposes.

Beast's castle was not built with cannons in mind.

It's really a good thing that you're on a tower, watching them bombard, when it collapses. Gaston has nothing good in mind for you.  
_________________________________________

Do you have a pet dragon?

Wait! Where are you going? I haven't gotten to the good -

Ah, young lady, I feel I should warn you that there is a very angry-looking dragon -

Oh, good, he's a friend of yours.

I mean – how silly of me. I really should have recognized you from the story. Your ancestors have followed your progress closely, young lady.

Well, anyone whose escapades have killed the last of her line, from shame – NICE DRAGON! GOOD DRAGON! So sorry, miss, didn't mean anything by it!

Goodbye, then. I hope you found what you came for!

I wonder what that means, “Maybe I can at least save the rest.”

**Author's Note:**

> Many apologies to anyone whose childhood memories are now ruined, please remember this is a work of fiction!


End file.
